Trying to figure out how to teach about the Unrest in Egypt

Obviously this has been a tumultuous week in Egypt, and many students, especially in high school, have lots of questions about what is going on. As Social Studies teachers, in many cases we are the only teachers they have who may be willing to spend time talking about the situation, and I think that it is definitely our responsibility to spend at least some time doing so.

Personally I am spending at least 5-10 minute every day in class updating my students on the daily progression of events in the civil unrest, generally using a 3-5 minute video from ABC News (Nightline and Good Morning America have been good), MSNBC has been AMAZING (I've used clips from the Today Show the past two mornings), and if you can get the videos to load, Al Jazeera English has been incredibly valuable.

I've also attached a link to PBS Newshour's coverage of the unrest in Egypt, which has well defined videos, and even teacher resources such as Quotes, Warm-up Questions, and Discussion Questions.

Finally, if there is ANY way that you can engage with Twitter, I cannot stress enough how valuable watching the #Jan25 hashtag has been for following live developments, and the #Egypt hashtag has been popular with American responses to the unrest, though less valuable for on the ground coverage from Egyptians.

GREAT video for teaching the State of the Union

Tomorrow is President Obama's State of the Union Address, and if you are teaching anything with government or political science, I hope that you will be bringing it up, if not teaching it directly.

I found this excellent video from ABC news, that covers the history of the State of the Union, recent trends, and the role of the State of the Union in American politics.

Personally I will be showing this 3 1/2 minute video tomorrow to introduce my students to the purpose and history of the state of the Union, before requiring my students to watch the address itself tomorrow evening either on television or streaming online.

For those of you with access to the Methods fileshare, I have uploaded a State of the Union Address Viewing Guide to the Assignments folder. 

ABC News History of State of the Union

Council on Foreign Relations | Primary document resource for political science and government

This is a GREAT trove of primary source documents related to foreign affairs and foreign US policy in the relatively recent past (this includes head of state addresses, government reports, legislative resolutions, etc), collected by the organization that publishes the well respected journal Foreign Affairs.

Documents can be searched and organized by geographic region, topical issue, date, or type.

Council on Foreign Relations: Essential Documents

InformationIsBeautiful.net | Visualizing data as an artform

This is without a doubt the best source I have ever found for examining complicated data in easy to understand fashion. If you have been to a bookstore in the past year and seen the book The Visual Miscellaneum, this is the guy who wrote that book!

This can be an invaluable resource for teaching such complicated topics as:

political ideology...

climate change...

global economies... 

and so much more.

I've already been able to pull entire lessons out of these graphics, and just having one of these images as my desktop got my students talking when I was transferring from a powerpoint to a website.

I can't think of a more ringing endorsement than the fact that high school students thought it was fun and exciting to talk about global market dynamics and censorship based off a picture they saw in passing.

Information is Beautiful.net

C-SPAN Classroom | Free Primary Source Materials For Social Studies Teachers

Not surprisingly, C-Span has a really helpful website chock full of videos of pretty much everything we might need as current or future social studies teachers.

Political Science, Economics, History, Government, Media... it's all here!

It's a classic, and a pretty basic resource, but if you don't have it bookmarked and search for videos here regularly, you are missing out.

And of course the most valuable aspect of this site? School district firewalls won't block this website, unlike youtube....

C-SPAN Classroom

Daily political cartoons on any topic

So my classroom mentor uses political cartoons constantly in class, and I've begun to do the same in our Social Science class.  I will actually be creating an ongoing assignment for my students in the next week or so, who from February-March will be finding one political cartoon per week, and will be writing about the political commentary in each cartoon (maybe even in a blog that I have them create....? I'll update you on how this goes).

This site provides a massive quantity of indexed, cross referenced, and highly informative political cartoons on a huge variety of subjects. You can search for nearly anything that is political, and probably will find a wealth of cartoons that you could use in a class.

This site even allows you to subscribe to a daily email list, but I have to admit it has just gone into my spam filter for the past few weeks, and I haven't noticed the loss. So I leave that decision up to you.

www.cagle.com

The Evolution of US Political Parties, 1788-1840

This is one of the best resources I have found to explain the changing political parties of the United States over time to students. When trying to explain to students the difference between political ideology and political parties, I pulled up some of these images to show that while there have always been liberals and conservatives over time, the terms "Democrat" and "Republican" are relatively new terms, and their relation to the ideologies has drastically shifted in the past two centuries.

Timeline of Political Parties in the US 1788-1840

Timeline of Political Parties in the US 1820-1860

Timeline of Political Parties in the US 1896-1929